ly that
could change itself into a mouse, and from a mouse into a dandelion,
and from a dandelion into a camel, and from a camel into a
grasshopper, and from a grasshopper into a cat, and so on through a
thousand transformations. Her world leaves us giddy like the
transformation scene in a pantomime. In her artistic ideals she is a
follower, not of Orpheus, but of Proteus.

Yet who can disparage her April ritual? She is in league with the
whole singing earth, which once a year sets out on its long procession
of praise. Her new fashions are but an item in the general rejoicing
over the infinite resurrections of Nature. Every thorn-bush gowns
itself in green, a ghost of beauty. Every laurel puts forth new leaves
like little green flames. There is a glow in the grass as though some
spirit lurked behind it deeper a million times than its roots.
Everywhere Nature has relit the sacred fire. She has given us back
warmth--the warmth in which food increases and birds sing; and we can
no more escape her gladness than if we had been rescued from the
perils and privations of a siege. This is the time when men wake up to
find they are alive, and their exultation makes them poets. One of the
first things of which man seems to have become conscious in the world
about him was the renewal of life each spring.

The earth does like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn.

Once a year he beheld the coming of the golden age again. He
worshipped the serpent as the emblem of endless life long before he
learned to suspect it as the devil. He may have been an infidel as he
shivered in the winter rains, but the lark leaping into the sun
awakened the old splendid credulity again. He knows that Persephone
will rise. Hence the divine madness that possesses him year by year at
this season--a madness which nowadays expresses itself largely in
throwing hard balls at coconuts. Possibly this symbolises the
contemptuous smashing of the winter's fears, for is there anything
which looks more like a withered fear than one of those grisly brown
bearded fruits? And do not the showman's cries and his bell-ringings
at the coconut saloon make up a clamour like the clamour of the savage
beating forth the flock of his superannuated terrors? He is the
incarnation of the boastful faith that has returned to us. Perhaps,
too, the coconuts may be symbols of the hoarded food supply of the
winter--the supply which we were continually in dread might come to a
slo